The fact is, unlike your staff, your website is representing your business 24/7, and your website can say a great deal about you and your company.

The fact is your website is your shop front, and it needs to look good. As soon as people see it, you need them to think that this is the business for them, your website needs to be better than the rest and the best way to do this is make sure you regularly update it.

Looks maketh the website!

Are you embarrassed by your website? Your probably not alone they’re but the fact is this is how people will judge you. Customers will look at your website and make a judgement as to whether they want to work with you or not. A company could be the worse at what they do but if they have a good website, they have a better chance of getting their foot in the door. When someone pays a visit your website, they are looking at your company as a whole. They will look at this before they pick up the phone and talk to you. If your website design is professionally done, and your website has a lot of relevant information for your target market, they will regard you as a professional organisation in that field. But just as a good website give a good impression, a bad one can be very damaging. If your website has been poorly designed, and the layout is difficult to navigate, or the designs are out-of-date when compared with a competitor, they’ll have the same impressions about your business.

Always look at updating your content, if your blog posts have dates on them from way back when, or you still have your Christmas banner up in July, these too give a very negative impression about your business.

A mobile response

Smartphones are the way we view the internet. People are in front of their smartphones more than their desktops or laptops. If you also take into account that Google gives SEO bonuses to mobile-friendly sites, and penalise non- responsive sites, you can see it’s importance. The fact is, this is considered to be standard procedure for every website. Is your website mobile responsive?

Responsive website design allows a website to alter and adapt its size shape and appearance depending on the device the websites being viewed on. Someone looking at a website on a smartphone cannot use a desktop website, and in some cases, it can make scenes for a website to be designed from the perspective of the smartphone first.

Every day your site needs to work on a wider range of different devices, platforms, and browsers. This change means we have changed the way we look at web design web design as a whole.

So, if your website hasn’t been updated in some time, there’s a good chance that you’re losing mobile customers. It would be worth seeing just how easy your site is to use on your smartphone. The conclusions may surprise you.

Cracking the code

Is your website compatible with all of the major browsers? What about the source code your site is built it, is it valid? Is the programming language outdated? When was the last time any of this was even considered?

All of these factors ensure that your website is at the cutting edge of usability. The easier a website is to use and navigate, the more likely you will be able to convert customers. The standards for websites change constantly and quite radically. The techniques used to create websites become more sophisticated all of the time just to keep pace with the latest standards, usually set by Google. If your site was built quite some time ago, it almost certainly will be out of date. This can include unnecessary HTML code which can be the biggest culprit when it comes to why sites are running so slow.

Having your site cleaned regularly is important, but the best approach is to accept the importance of your website as a part of your business and get it updated every few years.

A stock picture tells a thousand words

Many sites, especially older sites use stock images for the majority of the pictures on their website. The fact is, people have probably seen these pictures before, and far from making your site, and your team look good, it can give the impression that you’re a little disingenuous. When designing a website, you want as many components that will positively reflect you, your organisation and the ethos of your business and this is never truer than with the images you choose to use. It is very common for websites; especially older websites have over dependency on stock photos. Although they have their place, it’s important to have as much of yourself represented on the website as you can.

The fact is, do these pictures represent you and your company or the vision and ideas of someone else’s ideas?

Call to action

As soon as someone lands on your website, will a new user know who you are, what you do, what service or product you offer? People are used to using new websites, and when they encounter an older one, it can be harder for them to navigate. Those customers just leave without interacting with the website. Many older websites have no “call to action”. These are instant messages the customer picks up on that are used to convert visitors to customers. A call to action is a banner, button, image or link that you place on your website, usually on the homepage of a website with the aim of driving potential customers from being visitors to become leads, and then customers. Essentially you want the customer to know straight away what your unique selling points are, and give them a call to action to get them to engage with your unique selling point. Use your call to action to drive the customer from the homepage to the payment gateway faster.

Measuring a piece of string

The fact is, all of this is all well and good, but how do you know it’s working, especially in the early days? With a modern site, you can accurately measure the effectiveness of your website, what people are looking at and what they are clicking on, or more importantly what they’re not clicking on. An older website just won’t have the metric tools needed to gather this sort of data. One example of this is heating mapping, where we can look at the places people spend the most time, and where people just aren’t going to, as well as conversion tracking & recording of users including demographics. Today there is a range of web tools that can help you to gather this information, and get a good idea of who’s using your site.

The pens mightier than the sword

The first thing people see on your website is the layout and the configuration, it’s great and people are looking further into your site but what’s the content like? A user is on your website because they want relevant information. A site redesign gives many companies the chance to evaluate the nature and the quality of the content that’s on the site, is it dated, appropriate, insufficient. Take the site redesign as a chance to completely change the content, and perhaps get into the habit of changing it as often as you can. Your content is king, and it’s your main sales pitch.

The content on your website can be some of the most important aspects of your entire website, as it helps customers to determine who you are in detail, and the more content you have the better.

Searching far & wide

Marketing and SEO are vital. Having the best site in the world is no good if no one sees it, and you want to make sure that when someone searched for your services or products, your website is at least on the first page of Google. The fact is, it’s a big investment but one that is needed. If you don’t keep your website updated, it will start to fall in search engine rankings. Search engines will put the website with the most recent and frequently updated content higher in its searches. It doesn’t matter how great your content is if it’s not new and it’s not frequently updated, your website will fall down the ranking.

A website redesign gives you the opportunity to evaluate the keywords you use and how effective the old keywords still are. The way people search for products and services as well as how they search for them has changed a lot in a short space of time, use a redesign to take a hard look at your SEO efforts.

It’s all about timing

This one goes without saying, but people hate slow websites. They will leave within seconds if your site just isn’t loading, this can also affect your in your search engine rankings too. New sites are always lighter in code and faster to run. The loading time of the website will determine if people stay and come back to your site. If your site runs slow then it’s probably time to get a new one.